Corel PDF Fusion

Get more from the Portable Document Format

Can you remember when software products
arrived with enough printed documentation to make an impact on the Amazon
rainforest (and possibly threaten you with a hernia) – those were the days? Now
we get a solitary disc in a cardboard box or DVD case, holding the software and
the documentation digitally stored in a PDF (Portable Document Format) file.
Developed by Adobe and now released as an open standard, PDF not only delivers
on-screen documentation but is the basis for software developers to come up
with solutions for creating format. One of the latest products to join this
party is PDF Fusion from Corel.

This software consists of three modules
covering Office add-ons, PDF Printer and the main part, Fusion. Rather
surprisingly for a product that’s based on PDF, Corel has opted not to supply a
PDF version of the user guide. Is this a case of Corel not willing to put its
product to the ultimate test or maybe the company feels this software does not
need any documentation? In fact, Corel has failed to include any form of
documentation, although you do get a reasonably comprehensive help feature.

Corel PDF Fusion

PFD Fusion works best when used to combine
documents that have been created in other applications such as a word
processor, spreadsheet or graphic application. You could create a document page
within Fusion, but this would be limited to text entered using the basic
free-flow text editor built into Fusion. This text could contain hyperlinks and
bookmarks, but any graphics would need to be created elsewhere.

When bringing in created documents, you can
either use the standard open feature or use drag and drop. Fusion supports over
100 file formats when accepting documents. As you would expect, the various
Microsoft Office file formats feature heavily along with formats such as those
used by Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop plus, of course, the Corel WordPerfect
family. Multiple documents can be loaded and these will be assigned their own
tab so that you can quickly switch between each one as the need arises.

Improve
your productivity and efficiency with PDF Fusion

There are three different methods of
viewing content within Fusion. By default, an opened document will appear in
Page mode, which is fine for most editing and viewing purposes. Mini icons, hot
keys and menu to either Assembly or Flick mode, with both making use of large
thumbnails to display content. While I found assembly mode very useful, as it
allows you to drag pages around and transfer them between documents, the Flick
carousel mode failed to make a positive impression on me and was ignored for
productivity purposes. Just remember PDF Fusion’s functionality is in
publication not creation.

As mentioned earlier, you can insert
hyperlinks and bookmarks into a document. There are also options to include
notes and comments within a document. A spell-check facility is available, but
this is restricted to notes, comments and free-flow text, which can be entered
directly into Fusion. Other text is presumed to have been checked by its
original applications.

Author and security options can be set
prior to the process of converting the document to PDF. You’re given a choice
of General, Press Ready, Press Quality or Web when creating a PDF document.
Whatever your choice, the process is usually quick to produce a PDF file that
can be distributed to others. Microsoft Office users will find that Fusion adds
a toolbar to their software with options to Create, Send, Settings and Import.